Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Over at the conservative Power Line blog is a post
titled, "Could Trump Destroy the Democrats for a Generation?" The gist
of the piece is that, in its efforts to understand why it lost the
presidential election, the Democratic Party has learned that a large
bloc of voters who helped put Barack Obama into office switched
allegiances and went for Trump this time around. Particularly
disturbing to me are some of the reasons these voters turned on
the Democrats, according to the Washington Post, which Steven
Hayward quotes:

One finding from the polling stands out: A
shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said
Democrats' economic policies will favor the wealthy -- twice the
percentage that said the same about Trump...

In one [focus
group], Obama-Trump voters were asked what Democrats stand for today
and gave answers such as these:

"The one percent."

"The status quo."

"They're for the
party. Themselves and the party."

One woman, asked
whether the Democratic Party is for people like her, flatly declared:
"Nope."

It is disturbing to hear the same zero-sum game
sentiment of the Occupy movement, down to the slogan, being cited as a
cause for discontent by this bloc of voters. Hayward proposes that,
like FDR, Trump can profit from the fact that whatever he does won't
really work, except to give him an excuse these voters might believe to
do more of the same. That may be the case, and I suppose
it might keep the Democrats out of office for a while. But
what's the point of "winning" when so many of Trump's policies are
watered-down versions of what the Democrats would do, anyway? And what
of our long-term prospects for freedom if so many people in the Land
of Opportunity fail to see that one man's prosperity, if built on
productivity and trade, does not come at the expense of another's? The
Democrats' destruction, even if real, is not the same as a victory for
freedom.

On top of that, I think Hayward overestimates how
much the new DNC chairman's emphasis on abortion and identity politics
will turn such voters away. They may be social conservatives, but if
they buy into the adversarial worldview of the left, everything else
he's doing (i.e., push even harder to the left) will bear electoral
fruit when Trump's failed policies are mislabeled as "capitalism" and
someone runs against them.